A recent, five-day DARPA Hackfest attracted a mix of civilian coders, DARPA program staff, security industry professionals in suits, and military personnel sporting fatigues. They all gathered at NASA Research Park in Moffett Field, CA to come up with innovative concepts for drones equipped with Software Defined Radios.

As Dr. Linda Doyle, Professor of Engineering and The Arts at Trinity College Dublin, told us at the event, software defined radio (SDR) automatically detects available spectrum and switches frequencies when needed, which will become increasingly important as more and more IoT devices come online. At DARPA, the agency is looking for smart drone solutions for conflict zones, which could help address concerns about the US Armed Forces' use of the technology.

At Moffett Field, Hackfest participants carried drones to the "Range" (Hangar 45), a nearby flight test area. Posted signs warned participants not to transmit outside NASA-approved frequencies, and it appeared that everyone complied (nothing was shot out of the sky by a Battelle DroneDefender).

The Hackfest's marching orders? Come up with innovative concepts for SDR-equipped drones that: extend range from base station to multiple drones while avoiding interference; enable dynamic handoff between ground and air and vice versa; and integrate sensors to provide real-time data during flight.

Eight teams were cleared for the event, including participants from Aerospace Corporation; a partnership between the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Southern California known as DeepEdge; Fat Cat Fab Lab, a makerspace in New York City; and Assured Information Security, which staffs the Adversarial Sciences Laboratory, the Air Force Research Laboratory's cyber operations unit.

It wasn't strictly a competition—no trophies—but a way for DARPA to engage with the free and open source software community and spot rising stars. After all, DARPA's nearly $3 billion 2017 budget provides for 100 program managers overseeing approximately 250 research projects, mostly contracted out to third parties.

One of these program managers is Dr. Tom Rondeau with DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). He joined DARPA in May 2016 from GNU Radio, where he was the lead developer and maintainer, and his research interests include adaptive and reconfigurable radios, improving the development cycle for new signal-processing techniques, and creating general purpose electromagnetic systems.

"I've been involved in the open source community for many years," Dr. Rondeau told PCMag. "When I was at GNU Radio, we held hackfests like this several times a year, to keep the community energized and engaged in our work. You solve problems for days with too little sleep, and too much caffeine, a completely unsustainable way of working, but with short bursts of energy you can get so much done.

"For this DARPA SDR Hackfest, my team put software radios onto remotely piloted aircraft and we made this model system available to the Hackfest teams, who, we hope, will develop exciting new opportunities to build better and more complex cyber-physical systems."

Dr. Rondeau's team made the following available to team members: two types of high-grade solo quadcopter UAVs (with camera and gyroscope) and controllers—the 3DR Solo with Pixhawk-2 Controller OR TurboAce Matrix-S; ArduPilot autopilot software with Software Radio Peripherals; Ettus USRP B210 transceiver; and Linux-based workstations, such as HP's ZBook Mobile Workstation running Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS with Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 8265 and GNU Radio installed using PyBOMBS or installation method of choice.

It was time to watch some of the teams do pre-flight checks. With safety glasses on, and hard hats for those within the controlled area, we watched the DeepEdge team take its SDR-enabled drone through a test.

Most of the team stayed in front of the mesh boundary to operate the ground control base station. Then there were geek chortles as one of the students walked into the flight space with a blown up photograph of Khan (Starfleet references went down well at the DARPA SDR Hackfest, as one might expect). As the drone went up into mid-air, it became clear that Khan was the adversarial target. The UAV locked on and got ready to load and attack (but with no weapons on board, just looked battle-ready).

Dr. Marco Levorato, Assistant Professor in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, at UC-Irvine, took a moment out of supervising the DeepEdge team to explain what their drone was doing.

"We brought two faculty and two students from each university to approach the mission," said Dr. Levorato. "We're using video input to detect and attack a visual target. The drone is now locking on and centering on the target and we're now moving control to ground station from the drone. We're doing this as part of the mission to dynamically avoid interference depending on what's happening during the flight. We have some logic to protect control—including temporal and frequency recognition to achieve this."

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After scheduled test flights, the teams returned to demarcated hacker spaces to prep for the final flight-off that Friday afternoon. Dr. Rondeau and his team moved between the areas, offering guidance or a new perspective, sitting down with participants to work through bugs and problems.

"From the military perspective, the electromagnetic battlespace is one of the biggest threat spaces to the future," Dr. Rondeau pointed out. "And we, in the US, have to be better at using it, because we have to be controlling it to maintain our competitive advantage. Here at the DARPA SDR Hackfest today, we're surfacing talent, ideas, concepts that aren't rooted in the past ways of doing things. We have an internal term at DARPA—'non-traditional performers'—this means smart individuals and teams who can perform at a level that events like today challenge them to do, that's who we're looking for today."

If you fancy yourself as a non-traditional performer, and want to dig into the SDR-related code yourself, the DARPA team made it available on GitHub. If you want to manipulate your own UAV and tackle the missions DARPA set at the Hackfest, there's an installation guide, too. Just remember to check your tethering and make sure you're not using protected spectrum or it could get dangerous out there. We'll keep you posted on the next DARPA Hackfest coming up in 2018.

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